Title: Discussion Board/Class Participation
Course: CPS 161: An Intro to Programming with Java - DL MM MASTER

Discussion Board/Class Participation

Watch the video that goes with these notes. If you feel like you would like more information about Blackboard discussion boards than is provided in my video on this topic, I do have the following link that was created to provide generic blackboard help on discussion boards:

BlackBoard Help Video on Discussion Boards - Click on this video link(4 minutes), if you are unfamiliar with Discussion boards

OverView:

Blackboard provides a Discussion Board feature that will be used for Class Participation. You will need to make a discussion board post for each assignment (JH0, JH1, ... JH7) to get full credit.

- JH0 -Introductions - For the assignment done in the first week, you will just enter in a short introduction in this discussion board. You can just enter in why you are taking this course and what are your future computer programming plans.
- JH1-Questions/Answers -  In this forum you can post questions related to JH1.  You can also reply to the Questions with Answers.

Similar discussion boards exist for the assignments JH2, JH3, ... JH7
- Please put in a good Subject line for any entries ... especially the Questions.
- Sharings - Instead of participating in question/answer scenarios, I have a Class Participation option called "Sharings". There are 3 kinds of sharing that you can post on this discussion board:
  - Discovery - something that you have discovered that you would like to share with the rest of the class
  - Lecture Notes - You have some good notes on a particular video lecture that you want to share with the rest of the class
  - Bookmarks - This is very similar to Lecture Notes, but you have added time stamps in your notes of where topics were covered in the Video Lectures.

Purpose of Class Participation:

For each class assignment, you need to do at least one(feel free to do more if you wish) discussion board post.

- If you are struggling with some assignment, you might want to post a question on the appropriate discussion board (i.e. JH3 Questions/Answers) and this will satisfy the "Class Participation" requirement for your JH3 assignment.
- Alternatively, you may have figured out JH3 and you want to provide an answer by replying to one of the questions on the JH3 Questions/Answers forum. This also will satisfy the "Class Participation" requirement for your JH3 assignment.
- Perhaps you don't like getting into the Question/Answering entries, but you have something to share that you think could be helpful to other students in the class. This is the purpose of the Sharings forum. So if you reply to the "JH3 Sharing" thread on the Sharings forum, you will also satisfy the "Class Participation" requirement for your JH3 assignment.
- The bottom line is that I want the "Class Participation" requirement to be useful for providing helpful student/student interaction. Note that your entry could be a JING or other video link. JING is a useful free software service for making a short video of your screen to provide a better way to explain what is going on. I have notes and a video on creating JING videos in my list of Lectures.
- Don't post completely working assignments because this will be a tempting way for some to miss out on the learning experience that occurs in doing the assingment. It is OK to post fragments of code that will be helpful.

Questions for the Instructor:

Note that if you have a question that you really want the instructor to answer, don't use the above discussion boards. There is one last discussion board called "Questions for the Instructor". In general the Instructor will not be trying to keep up with the questions on the forums mentioned above: i.e. JH3 Questions/Answers. However, the instructor will attempt to answer questions on the forum labeled "Questions for the Instructor". Note that posting entries on this discussion board does not count as "Class Participation".

How will this work?

- When you click on the "Discussion Board" button in blackboard, you will see that I have created the forums: JH0-Introductions, JH1-Questions/Answers, JH2 - Questions/Answers, .... JH7 - Questions/Answers and Sharings.
- All of these forums except for the "Sharings" forums are organized such that Questions and Introductions (for the JH0 forum) will require creating a new blackboard thread .... note the "Create Thread" link.
- If you are Answering a Question, then you will be making a reply to an existing Question thread.
- Note that once a question has been created, you can click on a "Subscribe" button which will provide you an email whenever some new activity (like an answer) has been posted on this thread.
- The Sharings discussion board is organized a little differently than the other discussion boards. You will note that you will not create any new threads on this discussion board. The threads are already created and they have the names: JH1_Sharing, JH2_Sharing, .... JH7_Sharing.
- To make an entry into the Sharings discussion board, you will reply to one of the existing threads: JH1_Sharing, JH2_Sharing, etc. The thread that you reply to will determine which assignment that you get credit for. For example, replying to JH4_Sharing will give you credit on the JH4 assignment.
- For the Sharings discussion board, I have 2 blackboard options for the "Subscribe" feature. I can have the setting such that you subscribe to the whole Sharings forum, or you could subscribe to each individual thread (i.e. JH4_Sharing). I currently have the setting such that you can subscribe to the whole forum.
- Each Sharing should have a good subject line. Additionally, I would like each subject to start out with one of the following strings: "Discovery:", "Lecture Notes:", "Bookmarks:" .

Modified: August 11, 2014 5:38 PM